Everyone was very relieved when the 1816 “Year Without a Summer” turned out to be a fluke, and growth resumed until the even-more disastrous year of 1825, when that busybody DeWitt Clinton went and opened the Erie Canal. While a spectacularly excellent thing over all, it hit the Southern Tier like a neutron bomb, completely wrenching all the patterns of travel and commerce. You can still see that Bath was laid out to be the great metropolis of western New York, with traffic running down the Conhocton and Chemung to the Susquehanna and the Chesapeake Bay. Now Bath stalled while little no-account shanty towns like Buffalo, Syracuse, and Rochester started to boom.
*Land prices down here collapsed, and farmers suddenly found themselves paying mortgages that far exceded the new values of their properties. There were demonstrations, near-riots, and conventions until they finally held a summit conference with representatives from all the towns, and the Land Office agreed to revalue all the properties.
*Opening the Crooked Lake Canal in 1833 ameliorated this to some extent. While not in Steuben, it drained commerce on Keuka Lake into Seneca Lake and thence to the Erie Canal system. Hammondsport became a true port, transshipping goods from as far away as Pennsylvania up to Penn Yan and the canal. The later Chemung Feeder Canal, linking Corning with Watkins on Seneca, also helped.
*Steuben County was larger back then than it is today, and the 1835 gazetteer showed that 43% of its land – almost 40,000 acres – was “improved,” that is, cleared and useable for farming. This was quite an accomplishment for a feat done entirely with hand tools and draft animals, in about four decades. Of course it was also an ecological holocaust, and an open invitation to flooding.
*Steubeners in 1835 owned 43,000 cattle, 11,000 horses, a hundred thousand sheep, and 36,000 swine. They owned and operated 43 grist mills, 257 sawmills, two oil mills, 18 fulling mills, two paper mills, one iron works, three woolen factories, five distilleries, two breweries, 19 asheries, and 32 tanneries. So all those sawmills, asheries, and paper mills prove that lumbering was still vital.
*The Crooked Lake Canal helped, but real revival began with completion of the Erie Railroad main line in 1851, serving Corning, Painted Post, Addison, Cameron Mills, Canisteo, Hornell, Arkport, and Almond. The Rochester Branch soon also served Coopers Plains, Campbell, Savona, Bath, Kanona, Cohocton, and Wayland. By the time of the 1860 directory there was actually LESS improved land, but there was also less TOTAL land, thanks to the loss of several townships, so the percentage had climbed from 42 to 45. Steuben folks now owned more cattle, sheep, and horses than they had in 1835, but considerably fewer swine.
*The 1860 gazetteer also tells us something about their PRODUCE. Steuben folks annually produced over 1.5 million bushels of grain; 60 thousand tons of hay; more than a quarter-million bushels of potatoes; almost 300 thousand bushels of apples; 2 million pounds of butter; and 200 thousand pounds of cheese. Much of this, ESPECIALLY the dairy products, would have been useless without fast transportation. According to this gazetteer, “In extent of territory and in agricultural wealth [Steuben] now ranks among the first [counties] in the state.”
*I can’t state this for a fact, but I assume that Steuben followed the general national trend of mechanizing its farming during the Civil War. Thousands of young men who normally would be swinging scythes were now shouldering rifles. Production was kept up by mechanical combines, reapers, and the like.
*This meant that farming became much more CAPITAL-intensive and much less LABOR-intensive. It took more monetary investment, and larger farms, to farm successfully, and it was harder to find a job in the field, even for the men who came back from the war. Many of the veterans who populated the “Soldiers’ Home” (now Bath V.A.) after 1878 were only winter residents. During the growing season they got those jobs that were still left, or they went back to family farms as unpaid extra hands. But the work wasn’t there to employ them ’round the year.